\chapter{Centenary of a genocide in Cuba. Weyler's “ reconcentration ”}

\chapterauthor{Jean LAÏLLE}




A black book of capitalism in Latin America, if it were to be exhaustive, should be a documentalist work bringing together the historical works on the iron and fire penetration of capitalism triumphant without sharing from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego.
Another method would be to shine a spotlight on this or that episode better known to historians than to the general public, but significant of the irreparable damage attributable to the ferocious British, French and then Yankee imperialist appetites imposing the law of colonial capital by subjugating the peoples who had just shaken the yoke of the immense Spanish-Portuguese feudal empire.
One then thinks of the countless victims around the Falkland Islands since England found a whaling interest at the expense of the Argentine Republic, around the opulent Paraguay with the Triple Alliance (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) which in 1870, after five bloody years, exterminated any male population of this crossroads of great navigable rivers.
One thinks of the setbacks of Peru, Bolivia and Chile barely independent because guano, dethroned by Chilean nitrate, provoked five years of the so-called "Pacific" war from 1879 to 1884 in the name of capitalist interests carving up one or the other of the three countries, arbitrated by the United States and depriving Bolivia of its access to the sea.
Dying for such lucrative fertilizers did not prevent Bolivians and Paraguayans from killing each other in the fratricidal battles of the Chaco War (60,000 victims, it is believed) for two "majors" of an oil that was not exploited afterwards.
How to make a choice between the southern cone and the confines of the central isthmus where companies
Fruitières penetrated by the iron of the modern railway flibuste for the interests of the United Fruit, from Colombia to Guatemala?
How can we talk about the “Green Pope” better than Miguel Angel Asturias, or banana strikes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

How do you treat the exploitation of Brazilian land as intensely as Jorge Amado in his novels?
Or better appreciate the slogan “Land and Freedom” than with the Mexican frescoes of Siqueiros?

Once written, this black book will have the detractors of the eternal coalition of liberals and conservatives to defend the civilizing virtues as did before them the Spaniards rejecting under the name of “black legend” the slightest criticism of their American empire evangelized by sword and fire.
This debate resurfaced in 1992 when the celebration of the fifth centenary of the discovery of America sparked the controversies that we know at the time of the Universal Exhibition in Seville:
the thesis of the encounter between two worlds, that of shock and that of pure and simple destruction.
It is by this word of “destruction” that the scandal arrived in 1552, under the pen of this bishop of Chiapas (already!) named Fray Bartolomé de las Casas who is at the origin of the so controversial notion of black legend.
Entitled “Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies,” his treatise had an immediate circulation in Spain and America and was a source of endless quarrels with the colonial authority.
As he first landed in Cuba after his studies in Salamanca, he necessarily noted the disastrous fate of the peaceful Indians of the island and his later pamphlet joined through the centuries the welcome speech of President Fidel Castro to Pope John Paul II on January 21, 1998:
“ ... you will not find here the peaceful and gentle natural inhabitants who inhabited this island when the first Europeans arrived there.
Almost all men were exterminated by exploitation and slavery that they could not bear, women, converted into objects of pleasure or domestic slaves.
There were also some who died under the thread of homicidal swords, or victims of unknown diseases imported by the conquerors.
Some priests have left heartbreaking testimonies of protest against such crimes. (...)
Under extremely difficult conditions, Cuba eventually formed a nation. It fought alone with an unsurpassable heroism for her independence.
For this purpose, a hundred years ago it suffered a veritable holocaust in concentration camps where a considerable part of its population perished, mainly women, the elderly and children; crime of the colonialists which, forgotten by the conscience of humanity, is no less monstrous. ”

We therefore hold with Cuba the two ends of a black book that opened in 1492 and has not yet closed, since this people has refused for forty years “to submit to the injunctions and the empire of the greatest economic, political and military power in history”.
Why not flip through one of those dark pages of capitalism in Latin America, written by capitalism itself exactly a hundred years ago, when it was taking off in Cuba, the last shred of this empire that five hundred years during the Spanish crown exploited?
At the moment when the powerful neighbor to the north is ready to pick this ripe fruit, humiliated Spain clings to it shamefully and it is, under the orders of Captain General Don Valeriano Weyler, the “reconcentration”, deportation of a people in its own land, from 1896 to 1898 \footnote{The Spanish word “reconcentration” is deliberately retained here instead of “regroupment”, which does not exactly render the concentration camp will of the Spanish colonial power.
It was therefore arbitrarily translated under the spelling “reconcentration”, used in the title.}.


\section{A colony on hold}


In the seventeenth century Cuba was already the world's leading producer of cane sugar, the profitability of black slaves on the immense estates of the Spanish colony having accumulated enough to open, from the first part of the nineteenth century, the era of sugar capitalism in the agrarian sector already existing from Havana to Matanzas.
The four sugar mills of 1784 were 22 before 1830, located near the ports in the increasingly large areas conquered from the subtropical forest that offered an astonishing fertility.
Around the possibilities of maritime or river piers allowing, thanks to cabotage to major ports, to export in 183,090,492 metric tons to Europe.
Landowners, in their expanding class optimism, were faced with rising production costs.
In 1820, Spain was forced, under English pressure, to abolish the slave trade.
Their clandestine acquisition became more expensive at the very moment when the first beet sugar factories appeared in France.
But paying smuggled slaves did not exempt the need to cart goods as the production areas moved away from the coast.

This is how sugar capitalism needed iron to develop. It was no longer possible, as the harvests were increasingly abundant, to transport heavy loads to the ports on rocky and dusty roads in dry weather and impassable in the wet season when animals and wagons got bogged down.
The owners of the sugar mills (ingenios) lost money maintaining roads and paths.
However, the feeding of a black man at the rate of two daily meals amounted to a real and a half, while it took three reals to feed an ox.
This is how we had to turn to the railway, whose first capitals were raised in 1830 but which did not prosper until 1837, when, 11 years before the Spanish metropolis, the six and a half leagues from Havana to Bejucal were put into service on November 19, the birthday of Queen Isabella II.
This line put 1200 carters and as many black slaves in their service, not to mention 300 or 400 muleteers.
This is how, without lacking Cuban shareholders, public limited companies were created, even if it meant relying on all kinds of knights of industry who had a good game to display their claims in an area where the Europeans themselves were taking their first steps.
Above all, it was necessary to have relations in London and for this to have North American intermediaries who, already owning plantations in Cuba, offered their relations and their capital, because a locomotive could only be English.
The island's capitalists were suspicious of the colonial, arbitrary and corrupt government.
For their part, the london bankers had no confidence in Madrid's finances.
It was therefore necessary for the English banker Robertson to lend 2 million pesos, guaranteed by the tax revenues of the Cuban ports, starting with Havana.
This is how the first Spanish-American railroad was Cuban.
A straw man, Don Claudio Martinez de Pinillos, well introduced to the court of Madrid, administrator of the colonial tax authorities, guaranteed Havana the English loan.
Each having taken his commission, the locomotives and rails finally arrived from London and the railway work could begin, not without the Spanish consul in New York having recruited American engineers with mirific contracts.

The mills having become “sugar plants”.
These real factories receive the cane from more and more distant cuts and their range of action continues to increase, to the point of encompassing the Cuban East still ignored by cane planters.
All that remained for the great sugar interests linked to the United States was to buy the lines so that the railway attached to the sugar “latifundium” was the vector of the Yankee saccharocracy\rfootnote{saccharocracy is some neologism from saccharosis, sugar, and -cracy rule. Roughly means empire of sugar} covering the whole island under the aegis of the Spanish colonial power.
Let us wait patiently until the end of the century to see it confiscated for the benefit of North American imperialism.
Cornelius Van Horne, builder of the “Canadian-Pacific”, whose father had conquered sugar by iron, was one of those who succeeded so that at his death he could say:
“When I think of everything I could do, I'd like to live 500 years... ”.
In 1902 the Estrada Palma government of the pseudo Cuban republic pushed servility to the point of proposing to the “Congress” to draw on public funds, for three years, enough to pay Van Horne the interest on capital he had risked in a line that had not yet yielded anything...
But let us not anticipate this nineteenth century that saw Cuba repeatedly rebel against the two colonial dominations that it did not accept to undergo, even if they had powerful internal relays.


\section{The last quarter of an hour}


When the Spanish administration was characterized by corruption and absolutism faced with the exploits of the liberators of the mainland of the empire, it was in full reaction of the affluent sectors combined with a deep popular discontent that broke out in 1868 the first war of independence observed with suspicion by the United States, which refused their approval and with indifference with the Europeans.
The Spanish crown has reason to worry about the solidarity proclaimed by its former viceroyalties in full emancipation.
Ten years of war, from 1868 to 1878, resulted in the false peace of Zanjon which solved nothing, except the timid emancipatory laws of black Cubans.
This period covers the teaching of national dignity emanating from José Marti, “the apostle of independence” (1853-1898), himself influenced by scholars trained in the school of enlightenment from the beginning of the nineteenth century within the most respectable humanist institutions of the colony.
Reformist and revolutionary tendencies then clashed between supporters of outright annexation to the United States or a cautious degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the Spanish crown, and those who saw more only in real independence, the revolutionaries.

Since the failure of the “Guerra chica” in 1878, when the United States (already) closed its Cuban sugar market, Cubans understood that independence was not a simple matter of feelings.
They needed it to negotiate reciprocity treaties or to be fully integrated into the North American system.

Fifteen years later, the most prominent wrestlers inspired by José Marti, undertook new military campaigns to liberate
Cuba of the Spanish metropolitan yoke. By 1895, the war was spreading from east to west, taking on proportions out of all proportion to the previous conflict.
José Marti was killed while attempting to intercept a Spanish column of 600 cavalry on 19 May 1895.
This setback increased tenfold the forces of the patriots under the orders of Maximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo who, at the end of 1895, invaded the Cuban West entering the opulent region of Matanzas where they burned the plantations, preventing the harvest of that year and paralyzing almost entirely the sugar industry for lack of raw materials.
From 1,034,794 metric tons in 1895, the tonnage of “Zafra” fell to 232,068 in 1896, even less in 1897, due to the military action of the “mambises \footnote{“Mambi” in the plural “mambises”: guerrillas of patriotic spanish friendly battles since the Ten Years' War (1868-1878).
Perhaps named after a black officer, Juan Ethninius Mamby, a deserter from the Spanish army. Unless it's a pre-Columbian Cuban word, the rebel with the cacique.}”, which forced the colonial troops to confine themselves to the fortified garrisons.
At the same time, the price of sugar fell by half while the steam engine, mechanizing the production and production of sugar, had mobilized enormous capital to replace that of the blacks released in 1886.
Hence the huge Yankee investments replacing those of the English bankers and
Spanish shareholders who see their colonial sovereignty wavering.
The railways increased their tariffs, with troop transports absorbing half of their movements:
as they were not charged to the military authority, it was necessary to catch up on sugar.
And the introduction of wage labour opened up a new expense in the cost price column...
However, the multiplication of military failures on the island, the huge sums of money that the obstinacy of the Government of Madrid swallowed up to curb this last colonial war, the incompetence of the general staffs, the unpopularity of the overseas service among recruits who did not hesitate to mutilate themselves to escape the uniform, the heavy liability of colonial corruption, tour advised Don Antonio Canovas del Castillo,  the head of the Spanish government, to put an end to all means.
Impatient and authoritarian, he hesitated to concede to Cuba an autonomy that he denied to Catalonia. 
He did not resist the outbidding of the oligarchy linked to colonial interests or the officers who demanded a merciless war against the Cuban insurgents.
He had appointed in Cuba as captain general Arsenio Matinez Campos, the same one who in 1874, at the head of a handful of men had put an end to the first Spanish republic and restored Alfonso XII without firing a single shot.
It was not the same in Cuba: in July 1895, defeated in the battle of Peralejo by Antonio Maceo, he proposed to his head of government to choose a strategy to liquidate once and for all this rebellion.
All the military measures adopted proved ineffective against the incendiary torches of the “mambises” that destroyed the plantations.
Cane trains were preceded by exploratory locomotives, forts were built at each branch, culvert or station.
The illustrated newspapers of Madrid published reports with engravings of convoys destroyed by the sabotage of the wooden bridges of the railway of the time.
Nothing helped, except the even more marked desire of sugar traders and entrepreneurs to protect themselves behind Spanish bayonets.
An officer known as the “Iron Man” who had already distinguished himself in the “Ten Years' War” (1868-1878) was remembered for his cruelty against the civilian population and was appointed Captain-General of Cuba, replacing Martinez Campos.
It was Don Valerian Weyler \footnote{Surname which has nothing Spanish and dates back to the mercenaries of the Walloon darde of the Bourbons of Spain.
Due to a lack of volunteers, Swiss, Irish and even Germans were added, which made the case of the great-grandfather Weyler, of Rhine origin.
The general, his great-grandson, was born in Palma de Mallorca to a military doctor on September 17, 1837, claiming this catalan island origin.}, known for his repressive imagination.
Recognizing that this war was different from the previous one, Martinez Campos himself had proposed emptying the water from the jar to catch the fish:
a leader as experienced as Weyler was able, he said, to apply this measure of “reconcentration,” which he found repugnant to do on his own.
It had already been used, albeit on a smaller scale during the “Guerra Grande”, but never exceeded the figure of 40,000 civilians regrouped after being forced to abandon their villages.
This politico-military procedure was therefore applied in order to deprive of supplies, men, horses the “mambise” forces who received them from all the villages and fields where they were like fish in the water.
After some initial experiments, it was on October 21, 1896 that Weyler published a campaign order in which he decreed the “reconcentration” of all the inhabitants in certain agglomerations, and this within 8 days, prohibiting the withdrawal of food from the villages or their transit by sea without a permit from the Spanish military authorities. 
To the population were added cattle.

“Hundreds of thousands of people were gathered.
In the affair of a few days, the localities with garrisons were transformed into huge prisons for the elderly, women and children without the slightest means of subsistence.
After having gathered them in this way, the Spanish troops had carte blanche to raze everything, burn the houses, destroy the fields and sacrifice the animals that they could not remove from the supply needs of the liberation army,” 
explains Colonel Raul Izquierdo Canoso, who has just published a study entitled “Reconcentration” published recently. \footnote{VIII International Book Fair in Havana, February 1998, PABEXPO.}


\section{A real genocide}


This measure was applied during the 2 years that Weyler's mission to Cuba lasted, 1896 and 1897. There is even a trace of it in the archives of the Cuban railway.
It is true that the third class is the one that carries the largest number of passengers of the company.
And since the majority of them are day labourers who have been "refocused" in towns and villages without even the necessities to feed themselves, they were even more deprived of means of transport.
The authorities of the city (of Matanzas) having wished their return to their former villages from where they had come here by the thousands, the company granted them all free tickets during the months of April and May 1897, either so that they could return to areas of culture, or to make them leave this city where
they can only live on begging. 2,325 people were transported in this way, but it was necessary to repeat the operation in December so that all these “reconcentrated” peasants who lived here can go and get work in the sugar factories and prepare the work of the “zafra”. 
An additional 2,781 were transported. 
This document dates the duration of this inhuman grouping begun in mid-1896, imposed militarily in October, but became untenable at the end of 1897, because it was still necessary to rotate sugar production, which was in free fall. 
Not to mention that the State did not sufficiently remunerate the transport of military units that landed massively as reinforcements throughout 1897. 
The Matanzas Railway had invoiced 117,398 pesos for 1896 for military transport and had received only 77,816 pesos, the difference being considered free services for the benefit of the State. 
This company nevertheless managed to distribute to its shareholders a dividend of 2\% while having received, housed and transported 4,322 soldiers disembarked from Spain in 1896 alone at Régla, the entrance to the port of Havana.

If Spain put an end to this vacuum clean-up operation, it was simply because it ended in failure on all levels. 
The policy of the last quarter of an hour then corresponded to the slogan "to the last man, to the last peseta" which had to be abandoned at the sad end of 1897 when General Ramon Blanco arrived in Havana to replace Weyler with instructions that suddenly became "neither a man nor another peseta!" 
Genocide aggravated by premeditation: it was only an experiment, it gave nothing. 
To the point that it is again a question of installing an autonomous government, an idea quickly discarded since, unable to concede to Cuba what is denied to Catalonia, it is soon donated to the latter, torn by the convulsions of the nascent anarchism, of a new captain general who is named ... don Valeriano Weyler. 
Barcelona was then experiencing an epidemic of bombs and attacks that added a Cuban reference to their targets. 
In 1892, General Martinez Campos escaped a bomb, but Canovas del Castillo took to the waters in Santa Aguda when on August 8, 1897 he was assassinated by the Italian anarchist Angiolillo. 
This was the response to Weyler's mass arrests that had filled the Dungeons of Montjuich with supposed anarchists or harmless anticlericals, horribly tortured or executed: 
the former captain general of Cuba had references.

As in Barcelona, Weyler's “reconcentration” made innocent people pay the price for the policy of extermination decided by the colonial government and in either case the classic spiral of escalation played like a boomerang. 
The majority of the men threatened by this “regroupment” chose to join the liberating army as in Barcelona where anarchism was joined because of the horrors of a repression that provoked gigantic demonstrations of indignation as far as Trafalgar Square.

So what had been the price paid by the Cuban people? It is difficult and easy at the same time to establish the figures since their source is of Yankee origin, but one does not see how they would have inflated them more cynically than to justify their military intervention of 1898 which, among other good reasons, claimed to respond to a humanitarian concern against the horrible Spanish colonizer.
 We have the 1887 census figure: 1,631,676 (of which 1,102,887 were white, the rest included black, mixed-race and Asian). 
And the 1899 census, conducted by the interventionist U.S. government, yielded 1,570,000. 
The decrease observed is not significant since Cuba already belongs to them and they have settled there in very large numbers. 
The death register for 1898 gives 109,272, largely attributable to hunger and disease resulting from the naval blockade established as soon as the United States declared war on Spain, making the survival of the victims of “reconcentration” even more critical.
 A U.S. Red Cross report, dated Havana, in October 1898 described tens of thousands of people walking the streets, including wealthy people who had had nothing to do with “reconcentration” and were snatching a miserable livelihood from the garbage. 
Clara Barton, president of the American Red Cross, had sent food, medicine and clothing collected by her even before the outbreak of war against Spain. 
However, the blockade of the Cuban coast prevented (already!) the arrival of these aids, which were partially used for the benefit of Yankee troops, which motivated a complaint by Clara Barton to the President of the United States, William McKinley. 
One hundred years after the facts Raul Izquierdo Canosa sticks to 300,000 victims as an order of magnitude, knowing that it cannot be rigorously accurate, but other historians put forward 400 or 500,000 without being able to prove it. 
For a population of just over one and a half million, the figure of 300,000, even when corrected downwards, is already horrific.

For we do not lack testimonies, a century apart, as to the extent of the extermination. 
Here is Lola Maria, literary pseudonym of Dolores Maria de Ximeno y Cruz, rich heiress of a Creole family in the city of Mantazas who had written her memoirs. 
She narrated the world of opulence in which she lived, not dismissing the testimonies of the most dramatic episodes of “reconcentration” experienced live. 
“ (...) The whole island had become a huge mousetrap, we were chased from all sides... Rather a city of insane than a huge asylum for the insane. 
Children in alarming proportions, men and women in the prime of their lives, decrepit old men barely twenty-five years old. 
One day our house fills up with a large family of "reconcentrated" – they did not want bread but a roof – and she, my mother, knew a secluded house in the vicinity of the railway line outside the city...
emigration was appalling, only those who did not have the opportunity to flee remained... 
at home, the most opulent house and the best stocked expense of Matanzas, we had resorted to the soup of these purslanes that grow even on the sidewalks and my mother had excellently patched them up as if they were exquisite ravioli ... . 
Every day the newspapers published the warrior exploits of the Spaniards who, at every encounter with the rebels, always pulverized them. 
In conclusion: nothing new on our side. I lived these days like a century... I lost weight by an arroba \footnote{1,5 kilograms, old castillan measure unit. }.”

These memories were published in 1983 in Cuba when, the manuscript of Lola Maria having been found, it was possible to establish a selection of which here is another example: 
“ (...) The smell, that smell that looked like nothing and that was that of “reconcentration”, was that which the climate spread like the disease proper to the corpses which, swollen like toads, spread it in the streets. 
All this legion of unfortunate people died without protest, in hospitals, on the public road, under the arcades. 
Sometimes a candle on an empty jar of beer, placed there by someone, indicated to the passer-by that this package was a corpse. It is claimed that the total number of deaths amounted to four hundred thousand. ”

Whatever the accuracy of the figure of these real hostages of the Spanish army, we must add an unexpected number of foreigners revealed by recent research at the National Archives of Cuba.
Also in Matanzas, death certificates show a high percentage of victims of Spanish or Canary Island peninsular origin.
Unsurprisingly, there are more than 3,000 Chinese since their immigration has been reported since the second half of the century in agriculture. 
But no or very few French people, perhaps out of gratitude to the Spanish authorities satisfied with the real fortresses that had become their coffee plantations in the santiago de Cuba region, proof of their hostility towards the insurgents. 
More astonishing is the figure of 1758 North Americans reported in December 1897 among the death certificates identifying Germans, Mexicans and several other minority European or American nationalities, not to mention the mention “Africans” with no further precision 


\section{And the U.S. wins the bet}


We know the rest.
At a time when Spain was striving to establish its existence as a decadent power on the last shred of its colonial empire, conquering imperialism only had to cross the Strait of Florida to pick the largest and richest of the Caribbean islands like a ripe fruit.
Without any competition from England, the largest exporter of capital in the world throughout the nineteenth century, including Cuba where it only had to retain its interests in Western railways to consolidate previous sugar investments.
The Castilian lion discarded, we must also rule out any desire to create an independent Cuban state.
Long before 1898 the Standard Oil Company, the American Sugar Refining, the Bethlehem Iron Works had invested in nickel, manganese, not to mention the American Tobacco Company.

All that remained was to prepare public opinion under the generous pretext (already!) of cubans' right to freedom.
This required erasing the contradiction between the condemnation of the inhumanity of “reconcentration” and the aggravating circumstances of the naval blockade of the island, the first military measure of the armed intervention officially dated 1 January 1899.
The famous “memorandum” of the Secretary of State for War did not mince his words:
“Cuba, with a larger territory also has a larger population than Puerto Rico, whites, blacks, Asians and their mixtures. The inhabitants are usually indolent and apathetic.
It is obvious that their immediate annexation to our federation would be folly and, before proceeding with it, we must clean up the country, even if to do so it was necessary to resort to the same methods as Divine Providence applied to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Present in the port of Havana since January 25, 1898, the armoured cruiser “Maine” of the United States Navy, exploded very opportunely on February 15 with 266 dead on board, while the entire staff of the ship was "miraculously” ashore.
“Everything is quiet here!” said press reporter Hearst from Havana to his boss, who replied: "Send pictures and I'll give war!"
The legal instrument that President McKinley obtained from Congress, the famous "Joint Resolution," made it clear that "the right of Cubans to be free" depended on "the ability granted to the President of the United States to have the resources necessary to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence and pacify the country.”

In their book, \emph{Chemins pour le sucre}(Paths for Sugar), Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia \footnote{Caminos Para el Azucar, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana.} add to the above:
“The treacherous tactic of the U.S. military command of the island was to deny belligerence to the Cuban forces, relying separately on their various local leaders and, once the Spanish rout was acquired, to prohibit the entry of Cuban fighters into the main cities in order to prevent the Spanish army from capitulating to the patriots... (which) were excluded from the signing of the protocol ratifying the Spanish surrender.
Thus the sovereignty of the islands passed from the hands of Spanish colonialism to those of North American imperialism.
The Treaty of Paris, formally inspired by “humanitarian principles and high social and moral duties,” actually concealed the U.S. military occupation of Cuba for an indefinite time and the acquisition by the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and pacific as spoils of war.”

There is not long to wait for the entire bet to be pocketed:
the 4 years of direct military occupation of Cuba are not over that, on May 2, 1901, the Cuban “Constituent Assembly” adopts the all too famous amendment imposed by the American Senator Orvill Platt which limits in the proportions that we know the independence of the country.
Voted by this pseudo Constituent Assembly on February 21, this correction is brutally imposed on her just before the official promulgation of May 20 under the cynical pretext “to organize the handover of the government of the island to its own people”.
To this cynicism, perhaps recalling the ravages of 1896-1897, the Platt Amendment adds that the Government of the United States receives from that of Cuba “the right of intervention to preserve its national independence, to maintain a government adequate to the protection of lives, interests and freedoms and the application and development of all health plans tending to benefit the relations between the island and the United States”...

José Marti, who died in battle before having experienced neither the tribulations of his people because of the “reconcentration” nor the humiliation of the confiscated victory and the betrayed independence, wrote this from New York, october 29, 1889: 
“For the island to be North American we have no effort to make, because if we do not take advantage of the little time we have left to prevent it from happening, it will be done by its own decomposition. 
This is what this country is waiting for, and what we must oppose (...) because once the United States in Cuba, who will get them out? ” 
If the current will of the Cuban people has tended for almost 40 years to respond effectively to this revolutionary challenge of José Marti, what is surprising that the current Cuban Head of State wanted to attend the presentation of the book on “reconcentration” of which we have quoted here excerpts. 
It was an opportunity for him to recall that the United States used the same method in Vietnam in what they called the “strategic villages”, a copy of what he did not hesitate to compare to these “Cuban concentration camps”. 
From there to consider that two of the greatest genocides of our time have a Cuban precedent... It was at least a school for Nazism and for imperialism.

For his part, Colonel Raul Izquierdo Canosa, author of the book cited, told “Granma” on February 1, 1889: 
“Maintaining such a high number of people in fortified places or areas under military control implied an increase in security measures in terms of means and men, although it is clear that the colonial authorities did not pay too much attention to the reception of the “reconcentrated”. 
In my opinion, Weyler's initial mistake, in applying such a broad and complex measure, was that he had not previously created the necessary conditions for its realization.”\rfootnote{Some quotation mark appear to be missing in this paragraph, i placed one where it was most likely supposed to be}
When they became aware of the problem they had created, the Spaniards adopted some measures such as the creation of cultivation areas on the outer lands of the fortified areas on January 1, 1897. 
It was already too late for Weyler, who could not prevent the series of defeats that followed that year.

On his return to Spain he enjoyed the sad glory of having been compared to the Duke of Alba whom Philip II had commissioned to extirpate Protestantism from the Netherlands, without success despite the execution of 8,000 people. 
He died in his bed in 1930, at the age of 92, not without having known one last avatar: 
convicted of participating in a plot against the dictator Primo de Riviera, thus denying a zealous biographer who had also granted “the elegance of never having risen up in arms against the government”. 
We were then in the middle of the Rif War, Spain had landed in Morocco as many soldiers as in Cuba 30 years earlier. Weyler was too old to offer his services...

\rauthor{Jean Laïlle}

Jean Laïlle is a journalist at \emph{L'Humanité} and a specialist in rail transport problems for Latin America and Spain.
